FIFTEEN
‘BLACK AND BLUE’
In December, 1972, the Nice police issued a warrant for the arrest of Keith Richard and Anita Pallenberg on charges arising from the alleged use of heroin at their villa, Nellcôte. It emerged that for the past year all the Stones had been under intense police surveillance with periodic stake-outs at their villas, even infiltration of their social circle by gendarmes posing as drug dealers. Just prior to the US tour, all five had to appear before an examining magistrate in Nice. Jagger, Wyman, Watts and Mick Taylor, after detailed questioning, were pronounced in the clear. Not so Keith, against whom damning evidence existed in the form of a dope-taking ex-chef at Nellcôte. By the time the warrant went out, however, Keith and Anita had fled to safety in the West Indies.
That effectively put an end to the Stones’ Riviera tax exile. After recording in Jamaica, for the album that would become Goat’s Head Soup, all five returned for Christmas in ‘good old England’, as they were quoted as calling it. The Jaggers were at Cheyne Walk when, on Christmas Eve, an earthquake devastated Managua, Nicaragua’s capital and Bianca’s birthplace. Attempts to contact her mother there proved fruitless. On Boxing Day, Les Perrin received a phone call from Jagger asking him to arrange an airlift of medical supplies to Managua. Next day Jagger and Bianca flew to Jamaica, then on to Managua carrying $2,000-worth of anti-typhoid serum they had collected en route. Managua was a scene of almost total ruin: neither Bianca’s mother nor her father could be found anywhere in the city. Eventually, after Jagger organized appeals over the radio, both turned up, safe, in the neighbouring town of Leon.
Bianca stayed on in Managua while Jagger returned to Los Angeles to organize a benefit concert by the Stones, on January 18, 1973, which raised $280,000 for the Managuan homeless. The problem was getting the money past President Somoza, who controlled all the relief and reconstruction agencies and was busily increasing his personal fortune at the expense of the earthquake victims. Bianca sought help from Senator Jacob Javitts while Mick and the Stones rehearsed for their Far East and Australasian tour.
Japan was removed from the itinerary after its government refused to give the Stones entry visas. Australia declared Keith Richard persona non grata because of his heroin habit, but then relented and admitted the Stones despite an awkward moment at Honolulu, en route for Hong Kong, when a syringe was found in Bobby Keyes’s saxophone. The tour poster showed Australasia, putting out Jagger’s tongue to welcome their Boeing jet. On the journey, Les Perrin developed hepatitis, presaging a long deterioration in his health.
In June, 1973, Marsha Hunt went to court in London, claiming that Mick Jagger was the father of her year-old daughter, Karis, and requesting a magistrate’s order for maintenance. Though Jagger privately had never denied Karis was his child, he raised a smokescreen of legal prevarication, demanding an adjournment for blood tests. The story in the Stones’ camp was that, willing enough to pay maintenance, he had been stung by Marsha’s independence of spirit. It would take eight years for the matter to be settled out of court.
On June 26, as Keith and Anita lay in bed at Cheyne Walk, police entered the house with a search warrant and ransacked it from top to bottom. Keith, Anita and their friend Stash – the same Swiss princeling who had been busted with Brian Jones – were taken to Chelsea police station and charged with possessing cannabis, Mandrax tablets and Chinese heroin. Keith by himself was charged with illegally possessing a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver and 110 rounds of ammunition. According to Keith, the drugs had been left there by one of the succession of subtenants at the house during their absence on the French Riviera. Released on a thousand pounds bail at Great Marlborough Street Court the trio adjourned to Redlands which, four days later, mysteriously burst into flames. Keith carried Marlon and Dandelion to safety, then began salvaging what furniture he could. By the time Chichester firemen had extinguished the blaze, Redlands was without its thatched roof and virtually gutted.
On August 31, the Caribbean-influenced Goat’s Head Soup was released inside a cover that showed Jagger’s face in soft focus close-up, somewhat like the sepia study of some Edwardian girl in a voluminous motoring veil. The tracks included Angie, the Stones’ biggest hit single for years, with Jagger’s voice as entreatingly tender as it once had been on Lady Jane. There was also a song, originally titled Starfucker, whose content the most daring modern band could hardly have surpassed – the lyrics mentioned vaginal deodorants, ‘pussy’ and ‘giving head to Steve McQueen’. On Ahmet Ertegun’s insistence, the title was changed to Star Star and an assurance obtained from McQueen that he would not sue Atlantic for libel. Even so, the song joined Let’s Spend The Night Together and many other classics on the BBC’s banned list. Also currently in the charts was a tribute to Jagger by his old American flame Carly Simon, entitled You’re So Vain and full of pointed references like ‘You had me several years ago’, ‘You’re where you should be all the time’ and ‘Your scarf it was apricot’. Its subject might have been expected to explode in fury at the caricature: instead, he supplied anonymous backing vocals.
Somebody else whom Jagger had had several years ago was in a rather less buoyant state. Marianne Faithfull’s continuing heroin habit had left little trace of the innocent convent girl who had captivated him so utterly in 1964. Marianne was now literally living on the street – to be exact on a small stretch of low wall in St Anne’s Court off Windmill Street, just a few yards from Piccadilly Circus where all the city’s junkies and pushers and human debris come together. For something like eighteen months she sat on that low stretch of wall every day, conscious of little but hunger for the next puncture mark in her arm.
The experience, as Marianne remembers it now, was not all horror. ‘In a way I found it fascinating. For all my life until then, I’d always been the centre of attention. I’d always been looked at and admired. Now, nobody recognized me. I was watching the world as it passed. And I was never, ever harmed by the people I dealt with. I wasn’t mugged, I wasn’t raped. The whole of that underworld, for some reason, treated me with incredible gentleness.’
Her husband John Dunbar had belatedly divorced her on grounds of her adultery with Mick Jagger just before she and Jagger parted. After her brief fling with the Italian Mario Schifano, she began an affair with an antiques dealer named Oliver Muskett. He was kind and supportive to Marianne in her efforts to break away from her stretch of wall in St Anne’s Court and cure herself of heroin addiction. This she finally did at a hospital in – of all ironic places – Dartford, Kent.
We are at a photo shoot in the roof garden above Biba’s department store in Kensington, West London. One of the models is a dark, pouting beauty, dressed rather like a Latin version of Scarlet O’Hara in a flowing, be-ribboned gown, twirling a parasol above her head. The other model is a pale, pouting beauty in an angular custard-yellow suit and white shoes. The photographer is not Bailey or Donovan but Leni Riefenstahl, whose most notable previous assignment was covering the 1936 Berlin Olympics for Adolf Hitler. Mick … Bianca … Biba … fascist chic … we are at the very apotheosis of trendiness in London, 1974.
Bianca had insisted from the beginning that Mick and she were separate people and that she intended to have a career and public profile of her own. Indeed, there was a time when hers threatened to rival his. Fleet Street had just reinvented the gossip column, rightly supposing fatuous tittle-tattle about the famous to be an ideal antidote to fast-uglifying Seventies life. To these latter-day Boswells, Bianca Jagger was an early prime target, flying in and out of Heathrow, always looking disagreeably heavenly and saying nothing. Her wardrobe of vampish gowns, pillbox hats and ornamental canes inspired the first serious successor to the knock-kneed Sixties dolly-bird look. All over Britain and America, girl babies were suddenly being named Bianca.
Since her wedding, she had inevitably been deluged by offers of highly paid modelling work. Her appearances on the catwalk were rare, highly publicized and always dramatic. In a charity show for Oxfa
m at the Grosvenor House Hotel, she wore a low-cut gown and a two-tone wig, and carried a silver-knobbed cane. To the early Seventies fashion world she became what Maria Callas had been to grand opera, arriving for each shoot with myriad trunks and hatboxes, and a retinue of maids, hairdressers and even personal shoemakers. She was a supermodel twenty years before the term was invented. A movie career also beckoned in a production called Trick or Treat, set up by the fast-rising producer David Puttnam.
Within the Stones’ organization Bianca continued to be an object of dislike, resentment and mockery. She was seen as little more than a gold digger, ruthlessly using the Jagger name to further her own ambitions and shamelessly adept at spending his money. Les Perrin’s wife Janey remembers Bianca being sent off around the Mayfair shops with a wad of £20 notes in her handbag, but still phoning Les’s office to complain that she was ‘peesed off’. Shirley Arnold dreaded her tantrums over the limousines that would be provided for her; according to Shirley, she once sent a chauffeur away because he failed to raise his cap to her. ‘That car-hire company had worked for us for years, but they wouldn’t accept any more of our bookings after that. They said they just couldn’t put up with Bianca any more.’
More serious were the allegations of her failings as a mother to her three-year-old daughter, Jade. It was said she resented Jade for tying her to Cheyne Walk house while Jagger was off having fun around the world. She seemed to veer between maternal obsessiveness and seeming indifference, at one moment delighting in buying clothes for Jade, at another turning the little girl over to a nanny and going off for another day with hairdresser Ricci. For a time, Jade did not have her own private nanny, but was looked after by a girl who also had charge of Mick Taylor’s daughter, Chloe. (The girl was kept on low wages, for which she would revenge herself by letting Jade and Chloe play with their daddies’ gold discs in the bath.)
Bianca may have been proud, arrogant and temperamental. She was also an old-fashioned, rather puritanical young woman whom the Stones’ decadent lifestyle shocked to the core. Her frequent declaration that ‘I have nothing to do with them’ was seen as snobbish and stand-offish. In fact, as she later confessed, it stemmed from fear. She was terrified of being drawn into the half-world of drugs and depravity that had left Anita Pallenberg such a wreck of her former bewitching self. The only one of the Stones she liked was Charlie Watts. She respected Charlie for having principles, being utterly without airs and graces – and because Charlie’s wife Shirley, Bianca suspected, was the only Stone wife Mick had never screwed.
If Bianca lacked the instincts of a home-maker, there was seldom a settled home in which to develop them. Mick’s tax problems kept them away from Cheyne Walk for long periods when they would have to rent houses or apartments in France or America. Once at least, Bianca says, they crept back into England when they were supposed to have been abroad and stayed at Cheyne Walk feeling like squatters. ‘Every time we passed a window, we had to get down and crawl on our hands and knees.’
Bianca’s name for the Stones’ organization, that so disliked and undermined her, was ‘the Nazi state’. Even as Jagger’s wife, she found herself obliged to compete with his courtiers for his attention and favours – the more so if that favour involved money. After their mercy mission to Nicaragua following the earthquake, Bianca had stayed on in Managua while her husband returned to the world of rock stardom. She later claimed she had to ring Ahmet Ertegun in New York and get Ertegun’s assistant to ask Mick to send the money to pay her rent.
Those who genuinely cared for Jagger, like the loyal Shirley Arnold, were depressed to see what little happiness marriage seemed to be bringing him. When Shirley left the Stones’ organization after nine years, Mick and Bianca arrived separately at her leaving party. Each had brought Shirley a leaving present ‘from both of us’. They then had a furious row in front of Shirley about which of the two gifts the official joint one was. Jagger was increasingly seen around without Bianca, for instance carousing with Rod Stewart backstage after Stewart’s gig at the Kilburn State theatre. ‘’Ow about comin’ back to my ’ouse?’ he invited. ‘I got some brandy, I think …’ Irresistible images were conjured of a proud Latin beauty, waiting behind the front door with rolling pin poised.
In 1971, Talitha Getty, daughter-in-law of the world’s richest man, died mysteriously of a heroin overdose. She had lived in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, just a few doors away from Mick and Keith, and had entertained them at her house in Morocco. In 1972, their photographer friend Michael Cooper committed suicide after becoming so hopelessly addicted he had to use a wheelchair. In 1973, Gram Parsons, Keith’s country rock mentor, died suddenly in California and was cremated before a post-mortem could be carried out.
At each death, people said much the same thing. ‘That’s what comes of living too close to the Stones. In the end, you try to live like them. The Stones use people up.’
One potential victim, at any rate, got out while he was ahead. In December 1974, as the Stones prepared to record a new album in Munich, Mick Taylor announced his resignation. He had become disillusioned by Jagger’s reluctance to extend the Stones’ musical boundaries – and by the increasingly undignified situations in which he now found himself. The last straw, artistically speaking, had been a video film made for the band’s 1974 hit It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll, another stripped-down anthem with Keith’s chords dominant over Taylor’s lyrical lead. As the band played in prissy white sailor suits, they were slowly engulfed by a wall of white foam. Watching the video today, one can see the tension on Taylor’s foam-flecked face. The once-angelic non-smoking vegetarian was now firmly hooked on heroin, and realized that quitting the Stones was his only hope of salvation. The official press release said he was leaving because he wanted ‘a change of scene’.
Keith Richard sent him a telegram saying ‘Thanks for the past five years – it’s been a pleasure working with you.’ Jagger, peeved by this defection at an inconvenient moment, cattily downgraded Taylor’s worth to the Stones when asked what qualifications would be needed by his successor. ‘No doubt we can find a brilliant six foot three blond guitarist who can do his own make-up.’
A dozen or so famous names were variously touted to fill Taylor’s place, among them Jimmy Page, Peter Frampton, Jeff Beck, Steve Marriott, Shuggie Otis and Chris Spedding. The album-sessions, in Munich first, then Rotterdam, served as an audition for the shortlist of Rory Gallagher, Robert A. Johnson, Wayne Perkins and Harvey Mandel. Perkins and Mandel both contributed solos to the album released, more than a year later, as Black and Blue.
Wayne Perkins, Keith’s preferred candidate, had almost overcome Jagger’s havering indecision when it was learned that Rod Stewart’s band the Faces would soon be splitting up and that their lead guitarist Ronnie Wood needed a new job. Though much less a virtuoso than any of the other applicants, ‘Woody’ was one of the best-liked and most amiable figures on the British music scene. Stewart, as he confessed at the time, liked to hold orgies in his hotel room with several groupies at a time, photographing the scene with a Polaroid camera. Woody, however, would be more likely to be down in the lobby, showing the girls pictures of his newest car. In any case, experience had taught the Glimmer Twins that having too talented a lead guitarist only led to trouble.
The arrangement was that the Stones should ‘borrow’ Woody from the Faces to help them out on their 1975 American tour. The diplomatic language fooled no one in the music industry, particularly since Keith Richard was known to have been hanging out at ‘The Wick’, Woody’s house in Richmond. ‘The Wick’ shortly afterwards received a sudden visit from the drug squad, who found only Woody’s wife, Krissie, and a female acquaintance in bed.
The main problem facing the 1975 tour was how to get Keith past immigration authorities who termed mere cannabis-smoking ‘a crime of moral turpitude’. Keith had paid a heavy fine for his Riviera heroin exploits and was now technically free to re-enter France. He had paid a smaller fine for the drugs and .38 Smith and Wesson fo
und at Cheyne Walk, half-convincing Great Marlborough Street magistrates that the stuff had been left there by his subtenants. He was still as unlikely to receive his H2 temporary working visas as Dracula was to gain admittance to a blood donor session.
Blood was apparently the issue when Mick Jagger approached Walter Annenberg, the US ambassador in London, seeking a quid pro quo for the donation of almost a million dollars to the Pan American Development Fund. According to Spanish Tony Sanchez, the condition for letting Keith into America was that his blood must show not one speck of heroin. The story subsequently arose that he complied by having all the blood in his body replaced. Keith himself denies it, though he did spend time at the Swiss clinic where blood changes were given. ‘I was just fooling around with some people. I came in, opened my jacket and said “Hi – do you like my blood change?” That’s all it was – a joke.’
The Stones announced their new tour to New York by an impromptu performance on the back of a flatbed truck rolling down Fifth Avenue. This time the road organization involved thirteen articulated trucks, 150 tons of lights and a stage even more costly and elaborate – a huge flower whose (allegedly bulletproof ) petals unfurled to reveal the Stones inside as thunderous pollination. In Star Star (formerly Starfucker), quick-release gear bounced forth a gigantic rubber phallus for Jagger to punch and pummel.
Anti-Stone outrage was by now almost as cosmetic as the colour of Mick Jagger’s complexion. Rupert Murdoch’s supermarket tabloid the Star called for the exorcism of ‘this demonic influence on our children’ much as it had previously warned of the approach of swarms of man-killing bees. A church minister in Florida made the significant observation that, of 1,000 unmarried mothers in his parish, 984 had become pregnant while listening to rock music.
Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The Page 44